Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith: Are We the Empire?
George Lucas's science-fiction series tells the sad story of a democracy that crumbles into ruins and becomes an evil dictatorship. Is this galaxy really so far, far away?
By
Lucia Bozzola May 26, 2005
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the desiccated Emperor Darth Sidious and his dark Sith lords ruled with a literal iron fist over the Galactic Empire. The imperial Storm Troopers marched off to battle in long, shiny, perfectly coordinated lines to ensure the planetary dominoes fell. The Emperor and his chief minion Darth Vader oversaw their kingdom from the enormous military-industrial complex known as the Death Star. Helmets and hoods concealed individual human faces. Rebels either skulked around the margins in exile, or they were killed. In short, the Sith were the perfect movie metaphor (or so Ronald Reagan thought) for that “evil Empire” known as the Soviet Union. No wonder an all-American surfer dude and a mercenary yet ethical smart ass became the chosen ones for dismantling the Death Star--with an assist from an old British wise man.
Not so long ago and not so far away, the rather, um, ambitious Supreme Chancellor Palpatine knows he’s found the perfect apprentice when he convinces a bright young Jedi knight to laser-scissor off the head of an unarmed man. You don’t need to know your westerns to realize that’s a big no-no. But the Chancellor (a title that Hitler once had) is actually the big daddy Sith Darth Sidious, and he’s already managed to cement his power by getting the Republic into a long, pointless war against the Asian-y Trade Federation that’s been approved by the Republic’s large, representative governing body known as the Senate (or “Congress”). All he needs is a pretty, trustworthy, equally power-mad front man to do the rest of his dirty work at home. No wonder Moveon.org has decided that the Sith are the perfect movie metaphor for the attempts by majority leader Bill Frist and the Republican Senate to quash dissent and hijack the American judiciary.
For those of you keeping score at home, this interpretative back flip means that the first
Star Wars i.e. Episode IV i.e. “A New Hope,” the film blamed for ending Hollywood’s radical moment and blasted as an ideologically reactionary and conservative fantasy of clear order divorced from the messy reality of an uncertain cultural time, has spawned (or been spawned by, for the numerologically nitpicky)
Revenge of the Sith i.e. Episode III, a film that has the conservative critics all in a tizzy about its purported leftist leanings. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you probably already know that a postlapserian Anakin Skywalker informs a stunned Obi-Wan Kenobi, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy,” and Senator Padmé Amidala a.k.a. Mrs. Skywalker waxes downright poetic when she observes, “This is how liberty dies--with thunderous applause.” And if you have seen the movie, you possibly noticed that these well-publicized anti-Bush koans are joined by such evocative moments as Obi-Wan proclaiming that Anakin’s black and white, with me-or-against me ethos is most certainly
not the Jedi way, and a spectacular mano a mano fight scene that involves the physical destruction of the Senate chamber by Palpatine himself (who at that point bears a striking resemblance to Dick Cheney after a long night on the town). Indeed, as the
New York Times noted, Mr. Escapist Fantasy George Lucas explicitly did not dispel the notion that
Revenge of the Sith has a political message when he acknowledged that “fact” has caught up to the “fiction” he began imagining decades before during the Vietnam era. Sorry, guys. It isn’t just a movie.
That it stopped being just a movie long ago to the folks who showed up on opening day in costume and toting light sabers in a highly serious manner almost goes without saying. Lucas is their deity, the movie theater is their cathedral and the
Star Wars sextilogy is their sacred text. Hallelujah and pass the popcorn. As soon as you start talking real world politics and start throwing around words like “ideology,” however, people get edgy. And why shouldn’t they? For what’s striking about this six-part, three-decade cinematic-political Moebius strip is the one aspect that hasn’t changed at all: the
Star Wars universe itself. That’s part of the pleasure of watching
Revenge of the Sith: waiting for the moment Anakin gets his new name, his new outfit, his new respirator and his new voice, and to a lesser extent, witnessing the birth of the twins Luke and Leia. Lucas knows that, and, except for one moment of hilariously cheesy emoting, he doesn’t disappoint, using every weapon in his cinematic arsenal to lend gravity to Darth Vader’s introduction. What
has changed, however, is the cultural climate outside of the cathedral. Lucas has seen the Dark Side and it’s us.
With the first
Star Wars in constant circulation on TV, video, DVD and especially the record-breaking 1997 re-release, it’s easy to forget that it originally appeared at a time that politically feels very long ago and very far away: 1977. Democrat Jimmy Carter occupied the White House in part because Richard Nixon’s various shenanigans at home, in Vietnam and in Cambodia, and Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon for the illegal elements of those shenanigans made the Republicans look like, among other things, power-hungry autocrats. Also, the clear-cut good/bad dichotomy in
Star Wars seemed like an affront in part because the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s were in many respects about questioning and dismantling old ideas of “good” and “bad.” Then there was the looming, on-going threat of that other nuclear superpower, the Soviet Union. Despite the objections to its reactionary bent (and granted, that rather grandiose
Triumph of the Will ending doesn’t help), a story about scrappy rebels taking on Darth Vader and taking out the Death Star could, in fact, appeal to both sides of the aisle. Either the shaggy-haired outsiders were hitting the Man where it hurt, or the good old-fashioned rough rider Americans were proving their meddle against a monolithic foreign power capable of “nuking” a planet whenever it wished.
Now? The Soviet Union has been gone for so long that a significant percentage of the audience for
Sith either wasn’t alive when it was around or was too young to remember what it was like to have it there. The U.S. is the only superpower left, and that seems to have gone to Bush and the G.O.P.’s collective head at home as well as abroad. In other words, we are the Force. And as Palpatine instructs Anakin (and Obi Wan instructs Anakin, and Yoda instructs Anakin…brevity is not Lucas’ strong suit), the Force has a Dark Side as well as a happy, groovy, ethical side. The Republic can easily be turned into the Empire. In these terms, with their efforts to squash debate, punish nonconformists, stoke paranoia, and start international wars based on lies, the Bush Administration and their Congressional bully boys Frist and Tom DeLay don’t look too peachy according to the mythology of the
Star Wars moral universe. Indeed, it’s not that much of a stretch to think that in one sense Moveon.org has it wrong: Frist isn’t Darth Vader; Bush is. He’s the charismatic public face for Cheney’s Emperor, capable of winning over audiences with his unsubtle charms. He was supposed to protect us from the Dark Side of terror, violence, euthanasia and high gas prices. He was supposed to be the chosen one, the “uniter, not a divider” who would restore balance to the Force. He hasn’t been much of a success at this endeavor, but he still gained a second term on the strength of the perception that he was a bigger badass than that liberal wuss Kerry--and America looooves a badass. Darth Vader himself (so to speak) is such an adored figure that the one moment the very reverent opening day audience audibly reacted was when Palpatine first tells Anakin that he will be known from then on as Darth (pregnant pause) Vader. Cue the applause.
Sure, finding pleasure in movie villainy is nothing new; the bad guys always tend to be a lot more intriguing than the upstanding heroes. One suspects that had Lucas brought in a special guest to write and direct the scenes between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, anguished Anakin would come off as far more interesting than he does. Regardless, Lucas teaches the audience a harsh lesson in
Revenge of the Sith about applauding a Darth Vader, even before Palpatine uses the Senate chamber for a game of Ultimate Frisbee. Giving new meaning to the phrase “no child left behind,” the freshly minted Vader executes Palpatine’s order to extinguish the Jedi with a cruelty that is astonishing by
Star Wars standards. And in case it isn’t clear what Vader intends to do to those cute, blond “younglings” with his light saber, Lucas returns Obi-Wan to the Jedi temple so we can all see the carnage. Still clapping? The quest for power, for interplanetary domination, for the ability to manipulate life and death is a physically and morally lethal fantasy indeed, and the more the current Administration embraces it, the more we look like the Empire.
Even with Anakin’s relentless descent into darkness and his crippling fight against Obi-Wan on a planet spouting hellfire and brimstone, sorry, lava, Lucas does end
Revenge of the Sith on an upbeat note. He is, after all, an entertainer and we can’t leave the theater thoroughly bummed out (especially after the first two execrable prequels). In the final image, Obi-Wan delivers the infant Luke to his guardians on Tatooine as the double suns set. Or are they rising? Either way, Lucas has brought us back to the 1977 beginning, reminding us that the baby will grow up to be the surfer dude who learns the finer points of the Force from, among others, a Zen master of tortured syntax, and teams up with the urban smart ass to bring down Darth Vader and the Empire. Hm. Can it be that the “New Hope” for the Republic rests in California and New York?
Click to expand...
